Prediction of the nominal bending moment capacity for plain and singly reinforced rectangular RPC beam sections

Abstract EN

A new generation of Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) named Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) was developed in the last decades, which offers, superior strength, durability and ductility.

One of the main differences between other concretes and RPC is that the latter requires mechanical models capable of taking tensile behavior into account for structural application to enable the material to be fully exploited.

The complete stress-strain relationship under direct tensile test and uniaxial compression of different RPC mixes was experimentally investigated.

Nonlinear equations are suggested to model the complete tensile and compressive stress-strain relationship for all the RPC mixes studied.

In this research an analytical study is devoted to establish a simple equation for predicting the nominal bending moment capacity Mn of plain and singly reinforced rectangular RPC beam sections.

The equation derived showed good agreement with all the flexural test results performed in previous researches and some other investigations on reactive powder concrete beams.